3. The People’s Verdict: A Full Report of the Proceedings of the Krasnodar and Kharkov German Atrocity Trials (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1944), 7–44. Also, Ilya Bourtman, ‘“Blood for Blood, Death for Death”: The Soviet Military Tribunal in Krasnodar, 1943,’ Holocaust and Genocide Studies 23, no. 2 (Fall 2008), 246–65.
4. The defendants: I. F. Kladov, I. F. Kotomtsev, M. P. Lastovina, G. N. Misan, Y. M. Naptsok, V. S. Pavlov, I. I. Paramonov, N. S. Pushkarev, I. A.Rechkalov, V. P. Tishchenko, and G. P. Tuchkov.
5. The People’s Verdict, 21.
6. Executed: Kladov, Kotomtsev, Lastovina, Misan, Naptsok, Pushkarev, Rechkalov, and Tishchenko. See two Soviet documentaries about the trial and execution at http://www.history-vision.de/detail/2702.html and http://www.historyvision.de/detail/3164.html, retrieved September 8, 2011.
7. Alexander Werth, Russia at War, 1941–1945 (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1964), 732.
8. For instance, the memoir by the American prosecutor Benjamin B. Ferencz, A Visionary for World Peace, Chapter 4. Story 33. The Biggest Murder Trial in History, http://www.benferencz.org/index.php?id=8&story=32, retrieved September 8, 2011.
9. Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas, edited by Eugen Kogon, Hermann Langbein, and Adalbert Ruckerl, 69–71 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).
10. Bernie Farber, ‘Painfully slow court system gives war criminals free pass,’ The Star, February 16, 2010, http://www.thestar.com/Article/764817, retrieved September 8, 2011.
11. On January 31, 1943, Lieutenant General Arthur Kurt Schmidt was taken prisoner along with Field Marshal von Paulus and his other generals. On June 24, 1950 the Military Tribunal of the Moscow Military District sentenced him as a war criminal to 25 years’ imprisonment. On September 25, 1953 he was repatriated to Germany. Schmidt’s MVD card in I. V. Bezborodova, Generaly Vermakhta v plenu (Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 1998), 172 (in Russian).
12. Document No. 80 in Stalingradskaya epopeya: Vpervye publikuemye dokumenty, rassekrechennye FSB (Moscow: Zvonnitsa, 2000), 354–63 (in Russian).
13. Moscow Conference, October 1943. Joint Four-Nation Declaration, http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/moscow.htm, retrieved January 5, 2011.
14. SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 316–7.
15. Ibid., 317.
16. The English translation of the document UK-81 in Nazi Conspiracy and Aggressio. Vol. VIII (USGPO: Washington, 1946), 572–82; http://www.ess.uwe. ac.uk/genocide/USSR2.htm, retrieved September 8, 2011.
17. Details in George M. Nipe, Jr., Last Victory in Russia: The SS–Panzer–Korps and Manstein’s Kharkov Counteroffensive, February–March 1943 (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, 2000).
18. Charles W. Sydnor, Jr., Soldiers of Destruction: The SS Death’s Head Division 1933–1945 (8 ed.) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 269.
19. Curzio Malaparte, Kaputt, translated from the Italian by Cesare Foligno (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1946), 19–20.
20. Gerald Reitlinger, The SS: The Alibi of a Nation, 1922–1945 (New York: Viking Press, 1957), 196.
21. SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 317–8.
22. Soviet documentaries on the trial and execution of the condemned at http://www.history-vision.de/detail/1705.html, http://www.history-vision.de/detail/3162.html, and http://www.history-vision.de/detail/3163.html, retrieved September 8, 2011.
23. The People’s Verdict, 48–49.
24. Ibid., 65–66.
25. Ibid., 68–69.
26. Ibid., 78.
27. Ibid., 85–86.
28. For instance, Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka—The Operation Reinhard Death Camps. (Bloomington, ID: Indiana University Press, 1987).
29. Karl Pfeifer, ‘Zum Feifer-und Bedenkjahr 2005: Patriotische Einleitung,’ http://www.hagalil.com/archiv/2005/01/einleitung.htm, retrieved September 8, 2011.
30. The People’s Verdict, 89.
31. Ibid., 90.
32. Arthur Koestler, The Yogi and the Commissar (New York: Macmillan, 1945), 143.
33. ‘Pattern of Hanging,’ Time, December 27, 1943. The American and British officials were cautious about the information on the trial because of the Nazi threat to retaliate against the Allied POWs. Arieh J. Kochavi, Prelude to Nuremberg: Allied War Crimes Policy and the Question of Punishment (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 69–73.
34. ‘On the mass shooting of Jews by the German murderers in the Drobitzki Valley. Protocol. September 5, 1943,’ http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Kharkov.html, retrieved September 8, 2011.
35. Report of Major General I. M. Grishaev, commander of the Political Department of the 60th Army, dated January 29, 1945. Cited in Pavel Polyan, ‘Otvet na evreiskii vopros,’ Novaya gazeta, no. 6, January 28, 2008 (in Russian), http://www.novayagazeta.ru/data/2008/06/17.html, retrieved September 8, 2011.
36. The People’s Verdict, 95–99.
37. Ibid., 121.
38. Yurii Zainochkovsky, ‘Kharkovskii prolog Nyurenberga,’ Sobytie, No. 52, December 25–31, 2003 (in Russian), http://www.interami.com/2003-213.html, retrieved January 5, 2011.
39. NKO Order No. 74, dated May 29, 1944. Document No. 221 in Russkii arkhiv. Velikaya Otechestvennaya. Prikazy, 13 (2-3), 282.
40. Recollections by Nikolai Belov, who defended Mikhail Bulanov, in Zinovii Sagalov, ‘Protsess v Kharkove—prelyudiya k Nurenbergu,’ http://z-sagalov.narod.ru/publi_process.html, retrieved September 8, 2011.
41. Birstein, The Perversion of Knowledge, 88–92.
42. A. N. Trainin, The Criminal Responsibility of the Hitlerites (Moscow: Yuridicheskoe izdatel’stvo, 1944), discussed in George Ginsburgs, Moscow’s Road to Nuremberg: The Soviet Background of the Trial (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1996), 71–90, and Francine Hirsch, ‘The Soviets at Nuremberg: International Law, Propaganda, and the Making of the Postwar Order,’ American Historical Review 113, no. 3 (June 2008), 701–30.
43. ‘Kharkov Trial. First Pictures From Russian Movie Show Legal Trial and Death of Nazi War Criminals,’ Life, July 10, 1944, p. 94.
44. Producer Irvin Shapiro, commentary written by John Bright and naarated by Everett Sloane. See ‘At the Little Carnegie,’ New York Times, June 4, 1945; ‘The New Pictures,’ Time, June 4, 1945, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,775791,00.html, retrieved September 8, 2011.
45. The archive of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum has a copy of Heinisch’s SMERSH Investigation File from the FSB Central Archive, RG-06.025*02 Kiev, 1945–1946 (N-18762, tom 4), Georg Josef Heinisch.
46. Jantschi’s Personal File, RGVA, Moscow. Also, Jantschi’s and Karl Kosch’s prisoner cards in Vladimir Prison Archive.
47. SMERSH. Istoricheskie ocherki, 318–20.
48. The Burdenko report falsely stated that German troops were responsible for the Katyn massacre. Details in Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment, edited by Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva, and Wojcech Materski (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 226–9.
49. Frank Ellis, ‘Dulag-205: The German Army’s Death camp for Soviet Prisoners at Stalingrad,’ The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 19, no. 1 (March 2006), 123–48.
50. Special report by N. G. Khannikov to Abakumov, dated December 20, 1944. Document No. 25 in Tragediya Litvy: 1941–1944 gody. Sbornik arkhivnykh dokumentov o prestupleniyakh litovskikh kollabortsionistov v gody Vtoroi mirovoi voiny (Moscow: Evropa, 2006), 122–4 (in Russian).
51. Ibid., 321.
52. Poliburo decisions P47/107 snd P47/132, dated November 10 and 21, 1945. Document Nos. 330 and 332 in Lubyanka. Stalin i NKVD, 543–4 (in Russian). The commission consisted of Andrei Vyshinsky (chairman), deputy Foreign Minister; Nikolai Rychkov (deputy chairman); Konstantin Gorshenin, USSR Prosecutor; Ivan Golyakov, chair of the Supreme Court; Sergei Kruglov, first deputy NKVD Commissar; Abakumov; and Nikolai Afanasiev, Chief Military Prosecutor.
53. Alexander Victor Prusin, ‘“Fa
scist Criminals to the Gallows!”: The Holocaust and Soviet War Crimes Trials, December 1945–February 1946,’ Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17 (2003), no. 1, 1–30.
54. On the Remlinger Trial see Chapter 5 in I. S. Jažbovskaja, A. Yu. Yablokov, and V. S. Parasadanova, Katynskii syndrome v sovetsko-pol’skikh otnosheniyakh (Moscow: Materik, 2005) (in Russian); Diere’s ‘testimony’ was mentioned in ‘Two Nazi Generals Hanged by Russians,’ The New York Times, December 31, 1945.
55. The other condemned to death were Karl Hermann Strüfling, Ernst Böhm, Fritz Engel, Eduard Sonnenfeld, Gerhard Jahnicke, Erwin Skotki, and Ernst Gehrer. Soviet documentaries about the trial and execution of the condemned at http://www.history-vision.de/detail/3177.html and http://www.history-vision.de/detail/3178.html, retrieved January 6, 2011.
56. Politburo decision P59/200, dated September 10, 1947. Politburo TsK RKP(b), 489; Nikita Petrov, ‘Prestupnyi kharakter stalinskogo regima: yuridicheskie osnovaniya,’ Polit.ru, November 19, 2009 (in Russian), http://www.polit.ru/lectures/2009/11/19/stalin.html#pin16, retrieved September 8, 2011.
57. Report of N. Rychkov, K. Gorshenin and S. Kruglov to Molotov and Stalin, dated November 4, 1947. GARF, Fond R-9401, Opis’ 2 (Molotov’s NKVD/MVD Special Folder), Delo 174, Ll. 234–7.
Part VII. Toward Berlin
CHAPTER 21
Crossing the Border
In late March 1944, troops of the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian fronts crossed the border with Romania. On May 1, 1944, Stalin explained the Soviet move to the West: ‘Our tasks cannot be restricted by pushing the enemy troops out of our Motherland… We must free our brothers from German enslavement—the Poles, Czechoslovaks, and our allied nations of Western Europe who have been conquered by Hitler’s Germany.’1
During May 1944, new commanders of the 1st–3rd Ukrainian fronts were appointed and the main members of the Stavka, along with the commanders of every front, were given aliases to use in communications between Moscow and the fronts. Stalin’s alias was ‘Semenov’, Nikolai Bulganin became ‘Balashov’, while Georgii Zhukov was called ‘Zharov’ (Table 21-1). Evidently military leaders became more careful in messages that could potentially be intercepted by the enemy.
The work of SMERSH UKRs of the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian fronts and of the 2nd (foreign POWs and Soviet servicemen who had been POWs) and 6th (investigation) GUKR departments significantly increased. SMERSH operatives in the field were searching for members of General Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army (ROA), as well as for any local politicians, activists, and White Russian émigrés who could potentially create problems for the Soviet-controlled regimes Stalin planned to set up. Nicola Sinevirsky, who worked for SMERSH, wrote later that SMERSH’s ‘mission was to wipe out the segment of Europe that still thought differently and did not accept the Soviet system’.2
Romania
On August 30, 1944, troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front took over Ploesti (the oil-rich region of Romania, which was of utmost importance for the Nazi war machine), and then reached Bucharest the next day. The front included a Romanian division formed in the Soviet Union.
A week earlier, on August 23, Romania’s 23-year-old King Mihai I had ordered his guards to arrest the dictator Marshal Ion Antonescu and other leaders of the Romanian fascist regime.3 King Mihai was a great-greatgrandson of the British Queen Victoria by both of his parents; he was also a third cousin of the future Queen Elizabeth II as well. The king’s action was preceded by lengthy secret negotiations with the Western Allies and the Soviets.
Table 21-1. ALIAS NAMES USED FOR SOVIET MILITARY LEADERS IN 1944–45¹
On August 17, the Romanian opposition to Ion Antonescu had signed an armistice, which the King announced to his people on the radio. On August 26, in response to the Romanian ‘betrayal’, the Germans, under Lieutenant General Reiner Stahel’s command, attacked Bucharest. Stahel was one of the Führer’s most loyal and ruthless generals, and on July 27, 1944 Hitler personally awarded him the Iron Cross for successfully bringing out a group of German troops encircled by the Red Army near Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. After this, Hitler appointed Stahel Military Commander of Warsaw and then ordered Stahel’s transfer to Romania during the German suppression of the Warsaw Uprising, which took place between August 1 and October 2, 1944.4
The German efforts failed. On September 2, 1944, Minister Manfred von Killinger shot his secretary and himself, just after the Romanians burst into the German Legation.5 Colonel Traian Borcescu, former deputy head of the Romanian Special Intelligence Service, recalled in 1994: ‘I ran to stop [Killinger], and I saw him fall right next to his secretary. “Don’t panic,” said Karl Clodius, Germany’s representative for economic affairs in Bucharest, “the captain of a ship never leaves it when it’s sinking.”’6 As Time wrote, ‘Fat, scarfaced Dr. Karl Clodius has long been Adolf Hitler’s successful advance man in the Balkans.’7 All other members of the legation and most of the German colony (about 350 people) were detained by the Romanian security service in a concentration camp.
During these dramatic events, on September 29, a 21-man team from the Office of Strategic Service (OSS, the American intelligence service during World War II and the CIA’s predecessor), headed by Lieutenant Commander Frank Wisner, was dropped into Bucharest.8 Wisner’s code-name was ‘Typhoid’, while the operation was called ‘Bughouse’. Before this, Wisner was stationed at the OSS office in Istanbul and then in Cairo.9 With King Mihai’s permission the team immediately organized an evacuation of 1,888 Allied flyers captured by the Germans in Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia.
The team sent a huge number of Romanian diplomatic documents to the State Department in Washington.10 It also acquired about ten thousand dossiers in the buildings of the former Gestapo and German Legation. The reports and letters by SS-Hauptsturmführer Gustav Richter, ‘adviser on the Jewish question’ at the legation, were among the most valuable.11 From 1941–1943, Richter was Eichmann’s representative in Romania, and after that, he served as police attaché at the German Legation—i.e., the SD chief in Romania.
After analyzing all these materials, the OSS counterintelligence branch X-2 identified over 4,000 Axis intelligence officials and agents, over a hundred subversive organizations, and about two hundred commercial firms used as cover for espionage activity.12 A two-hundred-page file of this data was forwarded to Soviet foreign intelligence. The NKGB handed the American file over to the GRU (military intelligence), but it is unknown whether SMERSH received this information.
Until November, Wisner and his team were the only Americans in Bucharest, and Wisner established contacts with both the Romanian General Staff and Soviet military authorities. The team exchanged some information with the Soviets and even obtained the right to interrogate German military prisoners in Soviet custody. Wisner was on such good terms with the HQ of the 2nd Ukrainian Front that he was offered assistance in setting up an OSS outpost in Budapest.13 However, Wisner obviously remembered Bill Donovan’s (OSS head’s) oral instruction ‘to change [the German] targets to Russian intelligence targets in the Balkans’.14
There were also teams of British intelligence (SOE) agents in Romania. 15 The cooperation of British intelligence and Soviet foreign intelligence began in Moscow in September 1941, when Lieutenant Colonel Robert Guinness signed the first agreement with the Soviet representative, ‘General Nikolaev’ (who was actually the prominent intelligence operative Colonel Vasilii Zarubin).16 However, from the beginning the Soviets suspected the British of spying and in October 1945, British specialists discovered Soviet secret listening devices throughout the British Intelligence Mission’s building in Moscow.17 On December 10, 1944, the Soviet Foreign Commissariat sent a diplomatic note to the British Embassy in Moscow that stated: ‘The presence of the other intelligence groups in addition to those [of SMERSH] that are already in existence does not seem expedient.’18 From this time onwards, the Soviets pushed all the British and, eventually, the American intelligence teams out of Romania and Bulgaria.
On Aug
ust 30, 1943 Stalin ordered the troops of the 2nd Ukrainian Front to continue on the move, while part of the troops of the 3rd Ukrainian Front stayed in the city. In Bucharest, the Romanians handed the German diplomats-detainees over to operatives of the UKR SMERSH of the 3rd Ukrainian Front, while the Swedish ambassador, Patrik Reuterswärd, who took over German interests in Romania, ceded the building of the German mission to the Soviet military representatives.19 Interestingly, in 1943, he offered himself to the German Ambassador Killinger as a go-between in the proposed secret negotiations between the British and German representatives on a separate peace agreement.
Additionally, SMERSH operatives arrested all German military diplomats on September 2, 1944, including General Erik Hansen (head of the mission), Admiral Werner Tillessen (head of the navy mission), and General Alfred Gerstenberg (head of the air force mission) (Appendix II, see http://www.smershbook.com).20 General Stahel was also taken prisoner. Stalin considered the capture of the German military diplomats and generals a great success of the 2nd Ukrainian Front’s high command.21 The arrested German diplomats, along with Stahel, were sent to Moscow. This varied group included the above-mentioned Gustav Richter and Willy Roedel, a devoted Nazi and Killinger’s assistant on intelligence matters. Later both became cell mates of the Swede Raoul Wallenberg.
General Karl Spalcke, German military attaché to Romania from 1942 to 1944, was also among those arrested. SMERSH was especially interested in him because in the 1920s–30s, Spalcke was involved in the joint Soviet–German military program and personally knew Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky who was executed in 1937. Spalcke, a specialist in modern Russian history, hated the Nazi Party and despised both Richter and Roedel. Max Braun, Spalcke’s assistant, later told the MGB interrogators:
Smersh: Stalin's Secret Weapon: Soviet Military Counterintelligence in WWII Page 46
